Search engines that enable computer users to obtain references to web pages that contain one or more specified words are now commonplace. Typically, a user can access a search engine by directing a web browser to a search engine “portal” web page. The portal page usually contains a text entry field and, sometimes, a button control. The user can initiate a search for web pages that contain specified query terms by typing those query terms into the text entry field. When the button control is activated, or when a script executing on the “portal” web page determines that a specified event has been occurred, the query terms are sent to the search engine, which typically returns, to the user's web browser, a dynamically generated web page that contains a list of references to other web pages that contain the query terms.
All too often, such a list of references includes references to web pages that have little or nothing to do with the subject matter in which the user is interested. Even if the referenced web pages contain the query terms that the user has submitted to the search engine, this is no guarantee that those web pages will be focused on the topic to which the query terms pertain; the occurrence of the query terms in a web page may be merely tangential to the web page's primary discussion. As a result, the user is forced to hunt and pick through multitudes of irrelevant search results in order to find a select few web pages in which the user is actually interested.
What is needed is an automated way of focusing a search so that the web pages referenced in the list of search results therein have a higher probability of relevance to the subject matter in which the user is interested.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.